Secret Passages

by Paul Preuss

  “I want you to have this,” he said.

  She looked first at his enraptured face, then at the thing he held. “What is it?”

  “Middle Minoan workmanship, made at the height of their glory. Tell me what you think of it.” He sounded reasonable, as if he were asking her advice.

  She started to reach out but hesitated. He grasped her reluctant hand and turned it, laying the object in her palm. Her dark hair fell past her ears as she bent to study it in the wavering lamplight.

  It was a pendant less than two inches across. Two kri-kri were depicted in thin beaten gold, kneeling with their heads bent together, their thick necks and muscular shoulders neatly embossed in the metal, their legs folded beneath them. The altar on which they knelt was decorated with a running spiral of tiny beads of gold, and from it dangled gold disks rimmed with beads and fine wire circles of gold. Between their enormous, backward-curving horns the two kri-kri supported a larger beaded disk, attached to a loop through which passed a twisted strand of wool.

  “I apologize for the wool string. I pulled it out of my sakouli,” Minakis said. “It should be a golden chain.”

  “Who knows about this?”

  “Three others know it exists, but only you and I know where it is. Didn’t your brother show you the picture?”

  She said nothing, only raised her gaze to study him.

  “Yes,” he confessed, “everything here is stolen, in the sense that I haven’t reported it. After I bought my grandmother’s house in the village—from Kriaris, as you surmised—I decided to do a thorough job of following up Pendlebury’s original suggestion that the cave was a sanctuary. In 1938 he found only sherds, but his mind was on many other things. When I came here during the war, I was a sleepwalker—I was as taken with the notion of joining the guardians out there as with buried treasure.” He indicated the shrine across the pool. “This is how I found it. I only cleared away some dust and rubble. On my second visit I took the pictures. There’s more here, a lot of it at the bottom of the pool, all undisturbed. The chamber must have been sealed off in 1866, or else the people outside would have gotten in. So no one’s been in here for thirty-seven centuries. Only me. And you.”

  He took the pendant from her hand, where she still held it as if mesmerized. Opening the loop of yarn in his fingers, he held it toward her. “Wear it for me.”

  In his dark eyes she saw what she could not have imagined seeing in him when they first met, the final melting of a cold, controlling man. His passionate entreaty bordered on worship. It excited an answering heat in her.

  If only she could help him discover what he longed for in the inmost chambers of his heart…

  On impulse she bowed her head and felt him slip the loop of wool over her hair; she let him arrange her hair on her shoulders; she felt the warmth of his hands against her neck, and the weight of the warm gold between her breasts.

  She straightened, and Minakis stepped away from her. “You are truly Diktynna,” he whispered.

  “What are you saying, Manolis?” But she had heard him plainly enough; he had called her by the name of the goddess for whom the mountain was named.

  “‘For there is no place here/ That does not see you…,’” he said in his full voice, smiling now. “Indeed, you have changed my life. I hoped the god would do that for me, but I never found the god.”

  Her heart raced. “Manolis, whatever you think I am, I’m not.” She was suddenly afraid that he would come at her with the desperation with which other men came, projecting their want and need upon her, taking what they pretended to give.

  “It doesn’t matter what I think,” he said. “Take the pendant. Offer it to your brother if he agrees to tell the truth.”

  She said nothing. What he suggested was not only a crime but a betrayal of what he claimed to hold dear.

  His coal-bright eyes were fixed upon her. “You know I lured you here—because I thought I could give you what you wanted, a way to have your son. And because I thought I could make you love this island. So that you would not object when Peter wanted to work with me.”

  “You were so sure he would want to work with you?”

  “I was sure of too many things. I’ve been sleepwalking for half a century.” Minakis took a step toward her. “Give this to your brother, Alain. An artifact, that’s all it is. You can hold it in your hands; he can hold it in his. Any child is worth more.”

  She groaned and covered her eyes. When he reached out to steady her she leaned toward him, letting him envelop her in his arms, relaxing her weight into his encircling arms. She tried to suppress the sobs that racked her.

  She stopped shaking but still hid her head in his chest. “I’m sorry I told all those lies.”

  “I made you lie. I lied first,” he said. “But no matter, we always know when the other is lying. I even lied on the way here, and you knew it.”

  “About your father.”

  He nodded. “I loved John Pendlebury, but I never stopped wondering about my real father.”

  She brushed the tears off her nose and cheeks. He fumbled in his jacket and fished out a cotton handkerchief. She laughed when she saw it—not a Kleenex, a cotton handkerchief; after all, he was an old-fashioned gentleman—but she took it and dabbed at her eyes. “This was the place your father came to meet your mother. You must know that.”

  He shook his head. “Whenever my thoughts start in that direction I become restless, I let anything at all distract me. Maybe I do want to believe he was a god.”

  “They never found his camera. It must still be here.”

  For half an hour they searched different sections of the chamber; Minakis was bolder than Anne-Marie in wriggling into narrow passages that led nowhere, but she was luckier.

  “Manoli! Come here.”

  He hurried to her, carrying a lantern. Beyond the pool and the shrine, at the back of the chamber, behind a veil of limestone, he followed her through a winding passage into a raised chamber with a sandy floor and a ceiling of delicate crystals that caught the lantern light and shot it back in a thousand warm glints. On the floor lay a telescoped wooden tripod with brass fittings, still bright, and beside it a metal tray of the sort used to hold magnesium powder to make flash pictures.

  And two leather cases. Anne-Marie knelt in the sand and opened one of them, lifting out a view camera of pebbled black leather and chrome fittings, bright as new, its lens a well of polished glass.

  The other case was the same size. She lifted it, hefting its weight, and shook it. “These must be the plates. It ought to be safe to open this—the negatives ought to be in sleeves—but I don’t want to take any chances.” Anne-Marie looked at Minakis. “Your mother’s picture is on one of these,” she said with conviction.

  “After seventy years?” He put the lantern down and sat on the sand beside her, folding his legs easily beneath him.

  “It’s cool in here,” she said, “the temperature is the same summer and winter, and it’s been dark. Why not? I can borrow a darkroom in Iraklion—maybe at the newspaper—or make a darkroom in your house. I’ll develop them.” She saw his troubled expression and leaned toward him, encouraging him. “You can see your mother’s face.”

  “I’ve always been able to see her, in my imagination.” He shook his head irritably. “Are we obliged to know everything we can know?”

  “It’s meant as a gift.”

  “If I accept, will you take the pendant?”

  Her gaze darted back to him and she lifted the pendant from her breast. The golden ibexes gleamed in the flickering light. “I’ll take it, then,” she said, “and I’ll make my bargain with Alain. And I’ll tell Peter why.” She leaned toward him and pressed her lips against his. When she leaned away her lips were full and moist, and her skin was bright; her pale eyes glistened in the lantern light. In the shadows of the open collar of her shirt, the golden ibexes rested between the curve of her breasts. She let the tips of her fingers brush his cheek.

  He bowed his head,
then raised it to watch her face. “I have come to adore you, Anne-Marie—from a distance of years that cannot be bridged, except in this: before I knew you existed, I knew Peter was like me, that in some sense Peter was me. My hubris was to want to control him, to watch myself in him. You came instead, to remind me who I am.”

  Peter’s rented Fiat was chugging on three of its four cylinders as he pulled into the square of Ayia Kyriaki. He circled the cistern and let the car die in front of the church. Wearily he climbed out and, limping on his bee-stung foot, went past the old men who sat staring on the porch of the kafenion.

  Inside he found a middle-aged man at a wooden counter, slicing a block of dripping white feta into cubes.

  “Excuse me, do you speak English?” Peter asked.

  The man thrust out his chin and wiped his sweating face with a towel; “Dimitri! Ela!” he shouted, and went back to his work.

  A curly-haired teenager ran into the store. “Nai?”

  “Milaei anglika,” the man said, jerking his head toward Peter.

  “You are English, sir?” the boy asked.

  “American. Perhaps you can help me. I’m looking for Professor Minakis. Do you know him?”

  The boy shrugged.

  “All right. I’m looking for a chapel on a peak near here.”

  “There are many peaks near here, kyrie.”

  “Where someone has been carrying machinery?”

  The boy studied him. “What is your name?”

  “Peter Slater. What’s yours?”

  “I am Dimitris.”

  Peter put out his right hand. The boy grasped it gently in his own tough, deeply soiled hand.

  “How do you know ton kyrio Minaki?” Dimitris asked.

  “I met him a few days ago. He asked me to visit.”

  “Do you know the photographer?”

  “A woman with dark hair? Light blue eyes?”

  Dimitris nodded.

  “She is my wife.”

  “Ah, your woman. Come outside, I’ll show you the path to the chapel.”

  The weather-bleached wooden door of the chapel was locked, but Peter felt along the lintel and discovered an iron key. Before the door was half open he saw that he had found the place.

  Cautiously he rolled back the plastic shroud and studied the steel test bed and the instruments mounted on it, which corresponded to the sketches on the papers he carried folded in his shirt pocket. He peeked through the eyepiece of the telescope: the corner reflector on the roof of the chapel on Ambelakia filled the circular field. A black dot drifted across the bright backdrop: a bee.

  He bent down and craned his neck, sighting along the light paths, from laser source to beam splitter to prisms and back. Here was the “black box” wave guide; here, behind where the beams recombined, he folded back a metal cover to reveal—

  —a thin steel frame, holding an irregular shape between glass sheets. Peter frowned. It was not what he had expected to find.

  He fumbled in his shirt pocket and brought out the sketches, crumpled and sweat-stained by now and scribbled over with his own notes. He smoothed them on the bench beside the computer monitor. On one of them the unit under the hood was clearly labeled as a very large CCD, a charge-coupled device—far larger, in fact, than was needed to compare pinpoint beams of photons.

  Peter bent closer to inspect the object in the glass frame. It appeared to be a fragment of pottery painted black and red on pale gray, deft spiky lines that could have been thorn branches. Flakes of paint were missing, but despite the blemishes it gleamed as if it had been applied yesterday—as if it had just emerged fresh from the kiln.

  Peter stood back and looked around the chapel, puzzled. He had found Minakis’s laboratory, but where was Minakis? Where was Anne-Marie?

  Her flashlight beam played over rotten skeletons half sunken in muck, the skulls glowing brighter than before, luminous growths like magical mushrooms. In the darkness she lost her bearings and felt herself sway on her feet.

  “Are you all right?” Minakis demanded, invisible.

  “Yes, I’m…I’ll be right there.” She trod carefully among the skeletons and joined him beside the falling water.

  He had the knotted rope in his right hand. “Here, let me.” He took the leather case of plates from her hand. “Loosen your belt and tie it behind you.”

  “Okay.” She settled her camera bag between her shoulders. He gave the plate case back to her and she looped it through her belt, letting it bounce against her rear. “All set.”

  “I’ll give you a boost.”

  Minakis’s hands made a stirrup under her foot. The knots in the rope were hard and slippery smooth in her grip; she pulled, one hand after the other, grateful for Minakis’s hands relieving her of part of her weight—and then she was on her own, too high for his help, and it was only her knees against the wet rock as she reached higher up the rope, again and again, desperate to keep her grip on a rope as stiff and slick as a steel cable. She only had to get herself to the ledge, another ten or fifteen feet…after that it would surely be easier.

  She groped for the lip of the shelf and rolled sideways against the leaning boulder. Beyond the edge, the cave’s opening was visible above, a palely glowing delta in the darkness. “I’m on the ledge,” she called down to Minakis.

  “All right, I’m coming up.”

  She felt the rope stiffen again and felt it twitch from side to side as he swiftly climbed toward her. He pulled himself over the ledge. In the diffuse daylight from above, she could just discern his expression. “I’m really getting too old for this.” He sighed melodramatically, and when she laughed, he growled, “You think that’s funny?”

  “I know twenty-year-olds older than you,” she said.

  “Oh dear. Are they wiser too?”

  She thrust out her chin, a curt Greek no.

  “Good. Maybe there’s some compensation.” In the half-light his teeth gleamed. “Go on. I’ll be right behind you.”

  She hauled herself up the gentler slope on her knees, long past caring about mud; her jeans were thick with it. Within a minute she was squeezing through the crevice at the top of the slide, blinded by the white daylight at the cave mouth. At that moment, half through the narrow passage and unable to see clearly, she thought she heard something on the threshold of sound, an exhalation of the earth almost like a groan…

  She scrambled into the light, dragging the case of plates through the aperture. Kneeling, she loosened her belt buckle and freed the case and pushed her head back through the crevice to call to Minakis. “I’m safe…I mean I’m up.”

  “All right, I’m coming,” he called back.

  She could see nothing of him; her vision swam with motes that came from inside her dazzled eyes. “Hurry!” In the diffuse light of the cave entrance, everything seemed too sharply focused; every particle of stone and flake of lichen insisted upon its own presence. The rope tautened and jerked and a few seconds later Minakis was pushing his broad shoulders through the opening in the rock, looking up and smiling at her, his black eyes bright in his mud-streaked face—

  —and at that moment the ground moved under her knees with a grinding sound, like an animal’s deep-throated bellow.

  “Manolis, give me your hand.” She said it with urgent calm; they might have been boarding a boat.

  Still smiling, still cheerful, he reached out his hand to her. She took it just as the mountain heaved itself sideways, massively. Anne-Marie was thrown to her side; chunks of rock fell from the ceiling, bouncing into her, but she kept her grip on Minakis’s hand. The moss-slickened boulder that towered beside the crevice leaned and fell, crushing Minakis below the shoulders. Anne-Marie cried out in terror, but he only sighed; the look on his face was one of astonishment more than pain.

  More rubble fell, a cascade of gravel, and the air was thick with dust. Anne-Marie saw the end of the climbing rope whip past and vanish through a crack in the rocks beside Minakis like a snake making for cover. “I’ll bring help,
” she blurted. “I’ll bring help. Oh God. Oh please…”

  He squeezed her hand harder and a wordless groan escaped his lips. He lay beneath the stone, so powdered over with rock dust that he seemed made of stone himself, a half-carved statue with wet black gems for eyes.

  “Oh please don’t give up. I’ll bring help soon.” She had to tug her hand from his rigid grip.

  Peter had gone a few steps down the path from the chapel when the ground moved under his feet. He stumbled and tripped over his own sore foot and sat down. Rocks bounced and skittered past, clattering down the mountain. He waited until he thought the tremor was past, but as he was getting back to his feet there was a sharper jolt; the whole mountain moved sideways, and he sat down harder.

  He sat still, his thoughts knocked askew; something seemed to have let go inside him, as if the unsteady earth had robbed him of confidence. He was suddenly afraid for Anne-Marie, for her children; he was afraid for himself, afraid for their life together. He was startled to find tears welling up hotly.

  He brushed his palms on his dusty trousers and wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. Still seeping tears, he stood and began, unsteadily, to walk. He could not relate his sudden grief, his sense of loss, to anything but frustration.

  He had reached the saddle where the paths forked when he saw someone moving high on the side of Dikti, half running, half falling down the slope of loose stones that spilled from the crest. Recognition went through him like an electric charge. He ran toward Anne-Marie, but that effort lasted only a few yards; the incline soon had him sobbing for breath. He stretched his protesting muscles, climbing as fast as he could.

  She came tumbling down the mountain, bringing herself up short a dozen feet away as he struggled toward her, peering at him as if frightened. He saw her wide eyes, the dried mud smeared all over her clothes and face and hands. “Are you hurt?” he cried.

  Her dizziness passed. She knew him and stumbled toward him and fell into his arms, slack and exhausted, her weight almost bringing him down with her. “We have to get help.”